Alexander Grothendieck Revolutionized 20th-Century Mathematics

One of my favourite Grothendieck stories from <https://www.ams.org/notices/200410/fea-grothendieck-part2.pd...>:

> One striking characteristic of Grothendieck's mode of thinking is that it seemed to rely so little on examples. This can be seen in the legend of the so-called "Grothendieck prime". In a mathematical conversation, someone suggested to Grothendieck that they should consider a particular prime number. "You mean an actual number?" Grothendieck asked. The other person replied, yes, an actual prime number. Grothendieck suggested, "All right, take 57."

For anyone interested in Grothendieck's opinions on kimchi …

https://mikepierce.github.io/grothendieck-kimchi/translation...

If anyone's interested in Grothendieck's writing, which is primarily in French, I threw his "Séminaires de Géométrie Algébrique" (SGA, Algebraic Geometry Seminars) and "Éléments de Géométrie Algébrique" (EGA, Elements of Algebraic Geometry) into an LLM to translate it to English. It's spotty in some sections, so I intend to do another pass, but it's better than my remedial French.

EGA: https://github.com/jcreinhold/ega (https://jcreinhold.github.io/ega/)

SGA: https://github.com/jcreinhold/sga (https://jcreinhold.github.io/sga/)

I maintain a website of scans of things Grothendieck wrote, pictures, etc. https://wstein.org/sga/

Happy to see that it's got the obligatory monk/wizard photo.

For more life and times stuff I also suggest Labatut's Cease to Understand the World book and https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/konstantinos-foutzop...

Field medals are still handed out to people who deign to look upon his prophetic ramblings. I'm half-convinced the religious stuff probably unveils the geometric structure of the universe.

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